Saturday, April 26, 2008

In fact, as Mark Steyn outlines in his new article, Ontario branch of Orwellian tribunals will soon be getting even more power. Now they'll be able to persecute you not just for what they believe is "hate speech" but also for... being hatefully silent.

Happily, beginning on July 1, under Ontario's "human rights" reforms, Commissar Hall will have far greater powers to initiate prosecutions against all and sundry. Under the new proposals, " 'hate incident' means any act or omission, whether criminal or not, that expresses bias, prejudice, bigotry or contempt toward a vulnerable or disadvantaged community or its members." "Act or omission"? Of course. The act of not acting in an insufficiently non-hateful way can itself be hateful. Whether or not the incident is a non-incident is incidental.

In other words - if you don't enforce political correctness vigorously enough - then you must be agreeing with politically incorrect speech, that the freedom-snatching commissions deem hateful. And if you agree with "hate speech" - then of course you deserve to be hauled in front of an extra-judiciary tribunal, to spend thousands in legal defense while the complainer is getting all expenses paid and to be proclaimed guilty based on nothing but a mere assumption that someone's feelings must have been hurt.

To make things worse, anyone branded a "hater" won't even be able to speak up in his own defense. ISPs will simply refuse to host his blog or homepage, because that might be interpreted as "hate incident". Similarly, no newspaper editor will dare to print his letters. There may be no official censorship, but there will be millions of people afraid to say what's on their minds, let alone helping someone singled out by freedom-snatching commissions...

Apparently that's how the "progressives" see their "hate-free" utopia.